Here at Free Black Space we speak frequently of codes, but it could be some of us may not understand what codes are/mean?

At first I must mention the I-Ching. The I-Ching is a an oracle text that is connected to sixty-four hexagrams, which represent yin and yang lines in structures that hint at the energy and structure behind reality. One must understand that the explanation seems insufficient. If you do not understand the I-Ching, simply go pick up a copy, wiki it, or read on it. It will take time to fathom what the book truly is.

But our point is to begin here. What may be most important is the I-Ching's place at the core of what we know as Chinese Civilization. I often share with my students Confucius' saying, found in the analects, that if he could live longer he would devote more time to the study of the book of I. His reverence for the text is as important as the fact that the text had been around for close to a thousand years by the time he read and studied it. Needless to say, for those of us in America,the I-Ching was book whose age was at least double the age of our country at the time of Confucius(500 B.C.) The I-Ching is the oldest of the Chinese classics.

If one attempts to read the I-Ching, one will quickly realize that there is little in the West like it. As an oracle form it can be likened to Tarot, Ifa, or the casting of lots that got Jonah thrown off the boat in the Bible. Yet, the oracle in our society seems to be the opposite of prayer. In fact, some may assume the oracle to be just like the whichcraft/witchcraft our ancestors brought with them in the belly of the slave shape. Even without the use of the oracle accompaniments, one realizes that the text functions as a code.

~

It is said the hexegrams of the I-Ching represent renderings of sixty-four fundamental energies that are present in all of reality, all of our phenomena.

One way to describe the I-Ching is as a lowest common denominator set of metaphors for everything that exists in the realm of consciousness.

~

Though I do not understand it yet; feel free to google the I-Ching and DNA. Some masters reportedly know the relationship between the two. The assertion is profound. If true, it means that DNA was not discovered as recently as we think.

~

Yet, one senses the ice on the river loosening when one begins to talk about consciousness, phenomena, mind, and oracles. Things no doubt get hazy. Our predicament here is we know what we see and what we are taught. Suffice to say, if our educators do not teach us about it; we most often do not find it worthy. It is a consequence of our internment here. We rise out of slavery to be educated by the same people who had formerly enslaved us. Practically, and in terms of survival there is no other way. One should not be in opposition to reality. But one must also consider the contradiction. Slavery itself is a statement about knowledge. What was done to us is a sign of something our oppressors did not know, as compared to something they did. In other words, there is something they need to learn; and chances are we know it now, if we did not know it before. However, the educational systems we matriculate in, represent the refinement and limit of their knowledge, as does slavery.

~

Though the I-Ching can be discussed forever (the conversation has already been going on for millenia); it's relationship to China specifically and the East in general is historical fact. Chinese distinction as the world's oldest continuous civilization is important to note. The I-Ching is the oldest book in the oldest continous civilization.

~

In this light, though vastly simplified, the notion of code on Free Black Space aims to get at a reconciliation of what we know, learn, and exchange when we can speak freely. Our position as witness represents the knowing that cannot be falsely coded as white supremacy, superiority, or "civilization". We know this via our experience, but our predicament with education is that one receives grades for mimicking the oppressor, for relentlessly proving things one has already seen, for researching? in an attempt to document what already clearly exists. One can also throw in-the amnesia, the blatant lie, the unmarked grave at the core of our historical relationship with the country.

If one considers these elements it becomes clear that there may be something more than knowledge. Knowledge itself is a version of the empire. To be an empire is to say and mandate what is important to know.

But of course there is something else.

~

Also central to our discussion is audience. For the presence of a white audience can dramatically shift the codes of knowledge African Americans operate on. Many a black has been killed for something whites can easily get away with. Self hatred is one way of calling it, but another is to suggest that we are coddles and lawless. We can struggle against one another, but are punished via the law for struggling in such ways against whites.

If one thinks about the limits of communication under slavery all the riddles come to light. Slavery makes it clear that codes of knowledge that run the country are part and parcel of the system that enslaved us. What a "white person" can say gets at the essence of their power-a strange form of nommo with no real black counterpart.

Free Black Space is the place where you can say what you can't say out in the open. In that way you are free; but you are also limited. You are free to acknowledge what has happened, given you have an audience who will not resort to the ways of those outside a Free Black Space.

~

knowledge must be acknowledged to function as knowledge in a society

too often the what the black knows has trouble being acknowledged

~


A white man's superiority is not a valid concept in any shape or form. It is no more valid than an unspoken law to not look a white man in the eye. It is as invalid as a rule that says nobody black can marry somebody white.

We know the rules; and many of the rules are whack.

In essence they are whack codes like computer viruses in our brain. The virus metaphor may be too extreme, cuz it will shut the computer down-let's say they are like adware or invisible programs running in the background that slow down the CPU and make it sluggish.

~

Our lasting achievement is the effectiveness of our tactics. Successful African Americans like to imagine that their wealth, school systems their children attend, education, neighborhood, and job show they have utilized some effective code; but in these regards African Americans have been reduced to a side-show in the empire. Almost everything done in a black way (with exception of music) is a flavor or style. For instance, there is not a black way to build buildings or computers. One would argue, that there is not a white way either; but there very well maybe. For much of what we know as science and its applications comes to us via a system organized by the Western World. The African Centered folks would argue that the dominant concept of scarcity of resources was orignially incubated by the empire in the colder, more barren lands of Northern Europe. For some it is mythology. Many would argue that such things don't matter. And for all practical purposes, the I-Ching matters very little to the Western World. The Bible is perhaps a similar text, but the Bible is coded text without images to support it. The Bible lacks image outside of the words of the translations and the odd illustrations that say more about the illustrator,translators, and interpreters than God.

~


One of the pitfalls of African American intellectual endeavor has been to suggest that what we know is already represented by some cognitive blocks in the English language. The matter is complicated by some of the important elements of our internment here: our exclusion from systems of education, the oppressive nature of the educational systems we enter into (oppressor worship), the negation of the known we brought with us from Africa, the suppression of African American wisdom and linguistic expression, English as the Pan African solution to cross cultural communication, and the responsive transitory nature of our cultural forms. Though not developed here on Free Black Space, perhaps the absence of a stable written code of knowledge is what causes our culture to change and transform so rapidly. Our metaphorical genuis, our musical genuis, our ever changing sense of style, the wandering sense of the cool-our ability to invoke it and make use of it in a wide variety of situations, may all be attributable to the lack of a stable code. Of course the code is there, much in the way the I-Ching is a text that represents something else besides words. The true measure of words is found in the way they describe reality. In light of this, we can say the African American predicament is a reflection of our the failure to code our knowledge. Yet, the word failure has perhaps too much blame or suggested negation. Most fundamentally slavery represents a destruction of the codes of knowledge as they are replaced by the codes of knowledge that hold the oppression in tact.


~

A stable written code of knowledge (I would suggest one that is image based as compared to character based (unless those characters are pictorial and symbolic as is the case of Mandarin) is fundamental to civilization. The touting of the Greeks as the fathers (and mothers?) of Western Civilizaiton is simply a way of acknowledging the codes of knowledge they used as the foundation of the way we think about the world today. No doubt Africa has such codes, but they are part of our ancestral memory or submerged in the way we do things. One can access them via those who have taken up the study of African religions.

~

The practicality of the codes is a stable definition of knowledge that grounds one in interactions with society, nature, and anything we can imagine in the universe.

It is hard for most of us to imagine that such a code exists. The discovery of such a code has profound affects on ones consciousness. One grows reverence for ancestors, nature, and the great chain of being.

Slavery's goal was to take whites and use them as a substitute for God. No one ever really believed that, but it was extremely difficult to articulate. And if one articulated it, one would simply draw attention to themselves-some form of punishment.

~

Such codes regulate all of human existence to phenomena that is intereconnected. In essence such code, or the I-Ching and Ifa, represent the link between consciousness and the rise and fall of material. Such code links the seen and the unseen, the physical and the invisible, the sensory and the abstract.

~

Slavery and white supremacy's most devestating result is the idea that there is no code except those imposed upon us. The situation remains in existence until it is resolved in a code that accounts for the phenomena that is not based on opposition.

~

Unfortunately, it seems that the transcendent idea that we are all human and everybody has their own version of white supremacy is code the empire uses to ward off a clear reconciliation of the past-a balancing of the scales. The assertion that those did the deed continue to manage their own reconciliation is absurd. Yet, most would ask what can we do?

~

When we speak of codes here on Free Black Space we are dedicating ourselves to clarifying what African Americans know and atttempting to articulate linguistically. Code is not argument; for inherent in argument is opposition. Though fire and water are opposites and fundamental, they are not in opposition. They are well capable of canceling each other out or doing battle; but they do not fight. They exist. Code differs from argument by simply stating what exists.

We must understand what is natural phenomena in white supremacy and write our own code to explain it. And white supremacy is just one small piece of the equation. What we have learned here about being human is profound. We need to learn to acknowledge that knowledge and speak as if we were in a Free Black Space as we construct new texts. Other scholars have already done this. They are many, but I will mention Marimba Ani and Neely Fuller here. Molefi Asante's Afrocentic Idea functions as code too. Our goal here is to add to that body of work. We are not academic by label. We are intellectual in the way the slaves were. We are smart like them towards survival. Yes, we have agency. We are mining the knowledge experessed in a Free Black Space for code.


Free Black Space